[fredinno]

Originally Posted by Genauso

The Massey bridge will be a P3, which is my point. The Liberals do not have the budget space to spend, so they are choosing a more expensive option that nominally keeps the debt off their books even though defaulting on the payments is not an option.

I think it's essential to replace the Massey tunnel, and I see the need for other improvements that will be worth more than they cost.

We're in a ship headed for the rocks, we passed the point of no return under Christy Clark's reign. Drilling holes below the waterline to slow the boat down before the crash does work in the sense it buys more time before sinking, but the consequence is that it guarantees sinking the ship.

Look at the ICBC's dividend and Hydro's water purchase account. The provincial government transfers money out of crown corporations at will, even if they have to go into debt at a higher interest rate to provide it. Then came the payday loan P3s when the crown corporation credit cards maxed out. The province doesn't want to say it, but they're not stingy out of ideology but because the money isn't there.

I guess we could still privatize liquor distribution, I'm not sure what the snafu was there.

I guess my point is the economy, taxation, and public funding in the province doesn't work any longer. We might as well start from scratch. The big RE industry won't like it at first, but we'll probably transition to municipal bonds financed by Development Cost Levies that charge $X/s.f. per category of new development until the new bridge/subway/etc. is paid off.

The upside is if that works well, we could have a more responsive system where projects go ahead when they become worth it, instead of depending on a bunch of disconnected governments coming together at the same time without any one using their power to stop or delay a project elsewhere to get what they want for themselves. The downside are all the cities in America that went bankrupt when people with little accountability played the system much like our provincial government is doing today where they set up huge failures for others to deal with in the future.

Part of the problem is that there isn't one problem. There is widespread economic stress. Reducing royalties and costs for gas, mining, forestry, fishing has not kept rural jobs even stable despite growing markets. One day everyone and everywhere will be doing a little better, so the number and scale of crises will vanish. Until then, it's balancing a million failures.

The pre-commencement period is getting longer, and the scope of work is getting smaller to not include where the lanes will head when Oak St bridge is still 2 lanes each way.

If we need the extra cash, we can always dust off the HST, and privatize ICBC and BC Liquor. (and potentially BC Hydro and FortisBC?)

But of course, politics is politics. Hard decisions tend not to be made until the last minute.


PPP isn't government debt. If government doesn't have a share in the company, the risk is placed to the public sector. Thus the government gets no debt, and the company that faced that risk is the one who pays up the debt.

Originally Posted by Genauso

I know there's a difference the cost of building for peak vs average use.

I realize there may be some outliers that choose a commute that's significantly longer because they expect they'll save even more on the price of land.

But something that is forgotten, is that traffic isn't just kids driving up and down the street because gas is 5 cents/L and they have nothing better to do. It's not like a toll will reduce demand, as much as it will shift it.

Tolls shift demand because most people aren't thinking about driving most of the time they do it, it's automatic. Now you're asking them to gamble on paying a fee as one option for a set of uncertain experiences. I don't think price signaling will work until it's a closed loop where real-time traffic conditions are fed into your car so that it picks the best route for you.

I think we're talking about tolls right now because nobody wants to chip in more money, and that will be true whether you're talking about income taxes, gas taxes, gps-per-km tolls, bridge tolls. It's not a secret that land cost is leading Surrey's growth, and not booming jobs or amenities. We can talk about how great the economy is all day long on TV, but not being able to afford what was done easily in the past says a lot.


For now it'd be more practical to deal with weight/axle. Road wear is proportional to the weight^3 / area of contact patch. Maybe we could save some money if people switched to smaller vehicles, and covering the cost of damage should be built into the rate trucking companies are charging. Focus on the making changes that have the biggest payoff, and least effort.

I wonder what a fee based on kg&km driven would do to Translink, at what ridership level would it make sense to pick skytrain for a given line.

Unless America stops its obsession with everything big, that's not happening.

We try to distinguish ourselves from our neighbors to the south, but let's face it. The USA probably has more influence on us than we have on our ourselves.